Description
This paper purports to examine the politicization of Covid-19 rhetoric in the US, Europe, and Brazil in order to rethink two widely used concepts in the field of critical security studies: the idea of trauma (as an incomprehensible event) and the notion of disposability (as the biopolitical management of undesirable lives). We first focus on the very idea of trauma-as-incomprehensible, to trace the way in which Covid-19 has been framed as such, drawing on already existing framings from Holocaust studies, the rhetoric of atrocity, and scholarly work on trauma and memory. We examine how the framing of Covid-19 is as a dual trauma: one which resembles warfare with an enemy agent and one which resembles a crime against humanity with no agent but with deep economic casualties. We then turn to the politics enabled by the notion that such trauma is incomprehensible by focusing on two key facets: the death toll itself and the politics surrounding counting and mourning lives lost. By exploring different designations of essential workers and their role in societal functioning, we question the way biopolitical approaches have tended to describe the dynamics whereby life is made disposable.
